Got an interesting question recently where someone wanted to be able to switch the relationships automatically based on which slicer was selected. Take the following example: Here we have the same customer slicer shown twice, in this case we want to slice by customer but if the user uses the ‘baseline customer’ slicer the data should only filter on the ‘Baseline customer’ table and ignore the ‘Real customer’ slicer regardless if it is set. First... Read more

An interesting visualization pattern I have seen is that some customers want to be able to switch the axis on the chart dynamically using a slicer. Let’s take a simple model like this: where I want to be able to dynamically change the axis of my chart to be Currency, Country or Region using a slicer. Today that is not possible out of the box because you cannot have a single slicer crossing different table.... Read more

Usually I start my blog posts with an interesting question I got, this time we will do the reverse. I want to talk about a question that isn’t asked often enough: “Should I use DirectQuery?”. Read more

Just a quick post today. Power BI desktop has a feature to turn on the SSAS profile traces that allows you to see all the queries (DAX and SQL in DirectQuery mode) generated by the reports. I couldn’t find any documentation to turn it on so let’s take you through the steps here. Read more

A common questions I get is to change the connection string to from my report to SSAS after I move my Power BI desktop file into SSAS. It turns out this actually pretty simple as there is an API that allows you to copy and then bind the report to ANY dataset. Let’s walk through this. Read more

Another Power BI embedded blog post while I have a playground up and running. Often when you want to use SSAS with Power BI embedded you have a “authentication issue”. Power BI and SSAS both leverage AD so that means that any user you pass from Power BI to SSAS needs to be known in AD. Now that is great in enterprise scenario’s where this usually is the case (and even required) but for ISV’s... Read more

I have recently gotten this questions a few times so time to dust off my coding skills and get to work … the key question in both cases is how can I make sure I filter my report before any queries are being send to the underlying data source. When using Power BI embedded you can use Javascript to pass in a filter instead of using the Power BI UI. To test how this worked... Read more